0.16 Hypercities: a case study for the future of scholarly publishing

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The ideas articulated in this article owe a significant debt of gratitude to the HyperCities collaborative, particularly Mike Blockstein, Chris Johanson, Philip Ethington, Diane Favro, Yoh Kawano, James Lee, Jan Reiff, David Shepard, and Jay Tung, without whom the project could not have been conceptualized and realized.

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Introduction: hypercities and digital humanities 2.0

Built on the idea that every past is a place, HyperCities is a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces.  Developed though collaboration between UCLA, USC, CUNY, and numerous community-based organizations, the fundamental idea behind HyperCities is that all histories "take place" somewhere and sometime, and that they become more meaningful when they interact and intersect with other histories.  HyperCities essentially allows users to go back in time to create, narrate, and explore the historical layers of city spaces and tell stories in an interactive, hypermedia environment. A HyperCity is a real city overlaid with a rich array of geo-temporal information, ranging from historical cartographies and media representations to family genealogies and the stories of the people and diverse communities who live and lived there. HyperCities partners are currently developing content for Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Rome, Lima, Ollantaytambo, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Saigon, Toyko, Shanghai, Seoul, with many more (big and small) to come. The project asks a seemingly simple—but deeply fraught and often contested—question that is fundamental to identity: Where are you from? The answers, of course, are far from simple or straightforward. As a globally-oriented platform that reaches deeply into archival collections and links together a wide range of media content (including broadcast news, photograph archives, 3D reconstructions, user-created maps, oral histories, GIS data, and community stories), HyperCities not only transforms how digital scholarship is produced, accessed, and shared but also transforms how human beings conceive of and experience places. Born out of Web 2.0 social technologies, HyperCities represents a digital media environment that brings together cultures, languages, generations, and knowledge communities by mobilizing an array of technologies (from GPS-enabled cell phones to GIS mapping tools and geo-temporal databases) to foster a participatory, open-ended research and educational ecology grounded in real places and real times.

Over the past eight years, the HyperCities platform has been developed by an interdisciplinary team of Humanities scholars, librarians, community partners, and programmers. I direct HyperCities at UCLA, along with six co-PIs: Mike Blockstein (Public Matters, Los Angeles), Philip Ethington (History and Political Science, USC), Diane Favro (Architecture and Urban Design, UCLA), Chris Johanson (Classics and Digital Humanities, UCLA), John Maciuika (Architecture and Fine Arts, CUNY), and Jan Reiff (History and Statistics, UCLA). In this time, it has gone through a number of significant iterations. Beginning in 2002-03 with a Flash-based, mapping textbook called "Hypermedia Berlin," the first version of the project used manually geo-referenced historical maps of Berlin tied to hundreds of "hot spots" throughout the city to present a web-based environment for students to explore some of the urban and cultural layers of Berlin's history. See my discussion of the project, "'Hypermedia Berlin': Cultural History in the Age of New Media, or, Is there a Text in this Class?" in: Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (Summer 2005): (External Link)&projectId=60 While the humanistic impulses for the project were well-articulated (deriving from Walter Benjamin's meditations on creating a montage of Paris in his famous Arcades Project ), the participatory dimensions of the software were actually quite limited since it was essentially a closed system using a closed database. In 2005-06, Google released its Map Application Programming Interface (API) and, shortly afterward, the project received one of the first "digital media and learning" prizes awarded by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC. This support allowed us to significantly expand the scope of the project by facilitating new community collaborations and developing new interactive, educational components that made use of community mapping, visualization, and story-telling through time and place.